This
is the text of a talk given at Parklands by Eugene Halliday ISHVAL
tape 51.

Track 1

What am I going to talk
about tonight?

Divine hermaphrodite

Divine
hermaphrodite. How many of you saw the film about sex changes in the
Caribbean recently? How many? Let me see some hands. Yes, for years I
have been saying, “When I was a little girl,” and people have
been thinking I was joking. Of course, I was not, it is actually a
truth that the type of life is a mono-cell like an ovum and that a
sperm is a considerable further advance, you may now bow, gentlemen,
further advanced form than the ovum in its primal state. We can take
the ovum as a type of woman; we can take the sperm, wriggling and
pushing around, as the type of man. That being so, as each life
begins with the type of ovum, we have to say the analogy holds and we
all begin as women, on earth, that is. And that means that we are
stressed in certain ways, towards the earth, towards bulk, towards
receptivity. The sperm is biased towards drive, penetration,
initiation. But the sperm is only a developed ovum. It started life
like an egg, like a female, and it acquired the tail by energy input
devoted to externalisation. We could therefore say that the man is
naturally extrovert and the woman is naturally introvert, that is, as
far as life on earth is concerned.

But supposing we go
back to the source of life, before the earth exists, before it is
condensed as a solid globe, it is a part of the solar mass of
incandescent energy. And before it was incandescent, the same energy
was in the dark, it was not radiant. In physics at school you learned
that matter has phases, solid, liquid, gaseous and the fourth one,
incandescence. If you take a solid thing and heat it you can liquefy
it. If you take the liquid and heat it you can turn it into a gas. If
you take the molecules of gas and stimulate those, usually we do this
electrically, the gas molecules will become so agitated they radiate
light, they will become incandescent, which you will see in a
fluorescent tube, with which you are all familiar. So we can say
solids, liquids, gases, incandescence.

And
then we must reverse this order because factually, the earth
condensed from an earlier state. We can take it back. At one time
the earth was more fluid than it now is. The atoms constituting it
were sliding over each other. Before then they were dancing about ,
bouncing from each other like a gas, and earlier still they were
incandescent, they were agitated. But earlier still they would be
to what would be to us, darkness like the trapped dark of a Black
Hole.

Track 2

So in
terms of involution we should start with pure darkness, pure
nescience, pure not knowingness and

then the energy that is
there in the dark must, by self-agitation, because there is not
anything other than it, nothing other than it to agitate it, so the
primary agitation must be a self-agitation, it must make itself
incandescent. It then becomes like a nebula that we see in the night
sky, then this nebula then begins to turn, a spiral nebula and it
goes from the form of the Crab into a form, say in Andromeda. And
then it begins to condense itself to make suns and then to condense
further to make planets. So the order of involution is from the
invisible power, through visible power to rotating power, condensing
through the stages – atmosphere, liquid, solid, down to our earth.

So if we like to
imagine the power that constituted the world, before there was a
solid earth, before there was a fluid earth, before there was a
gaseous earth, before there was an incandescent, nebulous mass, there
was an eternal darkness. And this is the view of the rabbis in the
Book of Genesis, when it says, “And darkness was upon the face of
the structuring of itself, deep.” Don’t think that the statements
made in the Bible are rubbishy, primitive science. They are not. They
are mythological statements and the myth comes out of very, very deep
experience. The difference between a piece of logic, logo-logic and
mythologic is this, the logo-logic is a vibration of the Infinite
Field structuralising of itself, structuralizing itself so that, in
fact, by its own vibration it constitutes itself as an eidetic field,
that is, a field of ideas. But the ideas are not what we call today,
mere ideas; they are vibrant forms of invisible power. They are
structuring the universe.

There
is an infinite, eidetic structured field before there is any visible
evidence of it. What do we see there? In that primordial darkness we
see that there must be that already hidden in potentiality, which
later on comes to exist, comes to precipitate itself as the world we
now know. So that we have to say, in that hidden darkness was the
potential of becoming an incandescent nebula like the Crab Nebula;
the potential of beginning to spin, like the Andromeda nebula; the
potential of becoming condensed, like the millions of stars each one
of which is like our own Sun; and the precipitation around each such
centre of further condensations which we call planets. All these must
have been hidden in that primordial darkness, at least as
potentialities. Really heavy thought will tell you they are not mere
potentialities at all; they are actualities at a very, very high
frequency. That frequency we call Aleph, using a Hebrew letter
because we have used that, or the Greek letters for something else.
When we use a Hebrew letter in that way we are taking an idea that
might have a scientific formulation, like alpha, but we are saying
now we are lifting it back to its original position as a metaphysical
proposition. And the Hebrew letter Aleph, א
which my friend
Michael Solomon always thinks I am joking when I say things like
this, The Hebrew letter Aleph, which is said, in the lexicon, to mean
an Ox, really means what an ox means. An ox is something that keeps
the thing turning. If you draw the word OX, you will draw a circle
and instead of putting the cross outside the circle, put it inside
the circle and then you have done an elementary drawing
of a wheel, haven’t you? One O, one X. Now that is the original
form of that word It is simply a drawing of a wheel and it means to
turn and to bear a load. So the word ox, the word Aleph, means
Supreme, Infinite Bearer of all subsequent realities that might
appear.

Track 3

Let us look at that and
we can see that because all things come from it, that what we mean by
potentiality must mean at that level, actuality, because it cannot
pass from a condition of non-action to a condition of action, so that
it must actually be a very, very peculiar type of action.

We say potentiality
when we mean a power held in. We talk about a P D, a potential
difference between the two ends of an electric wire with electrons
flowing down it. That potential difference is an actuality. When we
say potential we mean
power held in, but it is only held in us from us, from our position
as finite observers. At its own level it is not held in at all, it is
activating itself and this is why the definition of God by good
theologians, is the actus purus,
pure actuality. God is not potentiality, God is actuality.But
actuality at the top level is so very fine that very gross,
dim-witted beings like us cannot actually see it. We have been
demoted. We, ourselves, have been sent down from a condition of
primordial darkness, of which the symbol is a Hebrew letter Ayin
(ע),
which means both an aye /eye, and a pure negation because it means an
observer without anything to observe, pure consciousness with no
object. Now we have been sent down from that condition. We use the
word ‘down’ deliberately because it says, “D - own.” We have
been divided from the Infinite in order to own the finite. To be
‘down’ is to be an owner of a limited area of activity. That is
‘down.’ Up, to the contrary, means power positing itself, power
positing. That is a vov peh (ו
פ), power positing
itself is ‘up.’

We have been demoted,
we have been sent down from primordial darkness, and darkness
mysteriously, means ‘light’ hidden from lower levels of
awareness. We have been made incandescent as a first stage from the
darkness, shine, we look, we see. What do we see? We see phenomena.
The word phenomena comes from a base pha,
which simply means ‘to shine, to appear.’ From that primordial
darkness the first step down w as light. .

Think about that, it is
very interesting; the first step down is a step into light. Why is it
a step down? Because in the light we see things; and in the moment of
seeing we are in serious danger of falling further into
identification. First there is the light, like the Crab Nebula. Then,
if we are not careful, the light will catch us like a moth caught by
a candle flame, and we will start rotating round the centre of the
light to see what it is, and this is the passing from the condition
of the Crab Nebula to the condition of the spiralling Andromeda. We
start to rotate round any point of interest. And to do that we have
gone down from primordial darkness, which is hidden omniscience, only
hidden from us, not from itself., to itself it is a volitional
actuality, to us it is a hypothetical possibility. Then we are sent
down into the light. In the light, we see; in the seeing, we become
interested; in the becoming interested we are verschwindeled,
we are turned round, we are spun. We are made to spin on an axis and
we pass from primordial nescience in the Infinite darkness of pure
volition, into the light of eidetic structures that we call ideas,
abstract ideas.

And we are then sent
down further. As we spin, what do we do? We form suns. Each one of
these suns is then a monadic centre of an individuated being, utterly
self-determined because it is actually that darkness
self-precipitated into a ball of fire like our sun.

And
then we get sent down even further. We get sent down by condensation,
by cooling, into the condition of the earth and that earth is our
bodies. When we go down onto body identification we have hit bottom.
When you tap yourself on the patella you are touching minerality. If
it hurts when you do it, you can hurt yourself if you do it very hard
yes that hurts a bit, if it hurts, that is one step above minerality,
that is biological. That is your sensation possibility, which in the
mineral, is held in very tightly; in the plant it is beginning to
loosen; in the animal it is beginning to run about; in the man it is
beginning to keep an account of its own activities.

Track
4

So we are all sent down
in that way. And then, in a primordial sense, prime-ordial
- first order sense of the biological, we find precipitated the
mono-cell, the lowest from of life, roughly spherical but tremulous,
undulating, able to distort itself, to put out a pseudopodium, a
false foot, like an amoeba . An amoeba is a mono cell, very simple
life which has, like all life has, a capacity for self-adjustment to
its environment, a capacity for predatory activity. There was a
marvellous nature film shown in which an amoeba flowed round two
higher order animals, paramecium, and it engulfed two them at once.
Did any of you see that marvellous film where an amoeba swallowed two
paramecium simultaneously? What did the paramecium do?

Attack
it.

No, no, they didn’t
attack it, they attacked each other. They blamed each other for the
trouble they had got into. Now isn’t that terribly human? And the
paramecium, fighting together, beating each other’s brains out,
attacking each other very fiercely; while they were fighting, were
being slowly digested and they finished up as a sort of globule
schlurb in the middle,
not able to fight, and before they died they were just sulkingly
disgusted with each other, letting each other down. And the amoeba
had got the benefit of their quarrel. If they had got together, their
heads together and said, “Let us attack this so and so, where is
the nucleus? Gather together boys, club together, and both together
attack the nucleus and eat it,” the amoeba would have been
defeated. But they did not. Like human beings, because they are
human beings in their early stages, sometimes they wonder whether we
are in the early stages, naturally, they blame all other human beings
for their own mistakes. Even in the deepest intimacy of the marriage
bed, there is a tendency to blame the other person if cold air comes
in at the bottom of the bed. Have you done that Gerhardt? You know
why you have not done it; you have already got all the clothes
spiralled round you., and Marghanita has gone in the next room
haven’t you dear?

Well this is
what tends to happen. We have been sent down but in our primary form
we do not have the smart, wiggly-tailed sperm. That is a later
evolute. Do you remember how we described how this activation
occurred in the mono-cells? Can anybody tell me what we said how this
primary differentiation occurred? What did we say about how this
primary or shall I do a little drawing?

That
is the surface of the sea (should have been in blue but it isn’t,
’cos it is the Red Sea), that is the ground of the sea (bed), this
is the land side here, and there is the sun is shining The shiny Sun,
and here are some mono-cells getting lots and lots of sunshine. And
the whole of the sea is full of these mono-cells and in that totality
we call it primordial soup, the very primal substance which required
just a stroke of lightning to cause it to fall into cellular form. So
there are cells all over. But down here, at the bottom, are some
cells which do not get much solar stimulation; they are in the deep,
dark bottom of the ocean. But over here there is a moon and the moon
has a peculiar power to cause marine animals, just before the full
moon, to come up to the top. It actually lifts water. That is how you
get tides isn’t it? So that down in the depths here, the mono-cells
that have no tails, once a month, feel a pull on them to come up.
Would you believe that is the origin of menstruation? They have a
tendency to come up when the moon is full and to go down when the
moon goes away again. But, where the sun is shining, the energy input
into those cells makes them very active. Now a spherical being, if
it becomes very charged with energy starts jittering and then it
feels it must do something about the jitters and it starts moving
about. And as soon as it moves it elongates itself a little bit. That
is how paramecium arose from the simple mono-cell, by simply
elongating itself. And then, by further energy input, it made an
economic device, a tail, which by lashing about it could flagellate
itself, the origin of that weird human aberration, flagellation, it
could whip itself about very vigorously and that was the very type of
masculinity. And what do we see? In the moon cell we see a passivity
and a waiting for the tidal effect to draw us up into activity at the
surface, and in the sperm we see the dynamic irritant tendency to
drive somewhere. Two basic characteristics, the passive, receptive of
the moon, the active initiating of the sun that is all creating this
primordial difference.

Track
5

Keep
that in your mind and realise that every man and woman on the earth
today, has actually proved, by its present existence a process of
evolution from a primordial state before there was the cut into what
we call male-female, a primordial non-differentiated field of energy
which, as it began to form itself into globules without tails which
we now call the feminine mode, became moon determined but those that
were sun-attacked, sun-energised, they became, what we today call,
male, and their residual traces inside human bodies are the ova and
the sperms in the woman and the man. Now there is absolutely no
difference whatever in the primordial life substance in which this
polarity occurred and the polarisation occurred because we were sent
down. We see this in the Genesis story, where Adam is made, in the
image of God, male and female, but mysteriously, the woman was inside
him. Because there was nobody to help him, and God said, “Well try
the animals, will they help?” and he examined them all and said,
“No, they won’t do.” Finally, God put him to sleep, this is
that histolysis process we were talking about again, and, in the
process of the sleeping of the primordial man, that is primordial,
protoplasmic man, before differentiation as we now know him, there
was abstracted from him that aspect which we now call, in its
super-stressed form, femaleness. It was actual inside Adam. When it
was taken out of Adam it was called ‘woman’ because it was taken
out of man. It was called Eve because that word means ‘that which
develops the life forms.’ But before it was taken out, it was
called Lillith. Now Lillith is the very image of playing about inside
oneself in an onanistic way, deriving whatever pleasures there are
simply from an introvert process, no extroversion, a wholly
introverted process in which is set up inside, the image of a
relationship within, so that, that man, that Ad- am, Da-ma, that
hidden male-female, was not yet a separated body. He was not sexed,
He was not sectioned yet. Sex only means sectioned. The primordial
type of life is not sectioned into male and female, it is simply a
being wrapped up in its own process.

Now imagine
that process. In it there is an awareness that one is a body, that’s
a feminine thing, there is an awareness of sensations of pleasure,
preference for pleasure, dislike of pain. Both of those are feminine.
There is an awareness that one has a form, and that is masculine,
that form will later be called the idea, and there is an awareness
that one can take the initiative, one can change one’s form, one
can extend, push out a pseudopodium, make an arm like an amoeba does.
These four faculties, these four powers are inside this primordial
being that is called in Genesis, Adam. Ad da,
am ma. Hebrews reade
this way and we read that way. So, when you see Ad-am, translate
Da-ma. Dama is hidden inside. Later on, when St Paul was on the way
to Da-ma-scus he had a kind of nightmare and he suddenly said, “My
God, the whole thing is a clear as mud. We are Da-ma, Dama-sus.”
The word means nightmare but it also means, ‘Father-
and-mother-horse.’ Horse means salvation, obviously. The moment man
had caught a horse and trained it; he had elevated himself above the
animal. That is the figure of the Centaur in mythology, a man who has
learned to control his own animality, he is a centaur, he is a
cantor, who is permitted to sing down his nose in synagogue and
frighten people at weddings, by his powerful nasal tone.

Da-ma is
simultaneous, throughout the universe and before the universe exists
in the hidden darkness of the Infinite is Da and Ma, hidden from us
but not from himself. The hidden Da-ma is the capacity, Da, for
self-division, self-activation, self-ideation, self-initiation. The
Ma is the power of self-substantialisation, of feeling oneself as a
substantial being.

Track
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Now
if you think of that kind of being, in the dark, infinitely
self-aware of the terrific power of self-division, it can make any
shape whatever, and it does so simultaneously., and it can
substantialise itself, stand on itself, use itself as its own unders
by simply precipitating on to centres. And when it precipitates on to
centres, it make sub-stantia.
It makes an under-standing for itself.

How
does that being feel? That is the being that we call God Head in His
hiddenness, hidden-ness not from Him, hidden-ness from us unless we
do the same thing that He does. Now He does not do anything except
examine Himself, examine His own precipitations of form, feel His own
sub-stantialisation. He never looks outside Himself because there is
no outside, because He is infinitely extended. He has no need of
anything because there is not anything but Him, He is entirely
self-sufficient.

Now
how would you feel if you were infinitely self-sufficient? You
could have a drive-in cinema show of your own by driving into
yourself, showing yourself your own films; Katherine Hepburn and
Spencer Tracy and Tyrannical Power and all kinds of funny thing. You
see them at will and immediately, no waiting. I had a friend, a
barber named Mori and his notice outside the shop said, ‘Mori, No
waiting!’ You could go in there and have your ears cut off any time
of the day, without waiting ‘cos He was a very fast worker.
Needless to say, he died about forty years of age through overwork;
but he was a nice boy before he went, ever ready to please.

Now
imagine the Infinite Godhead hidden in the dark is our source and we
have been demoted, by the process, first of all of saying, He said
that you know, “Let there be light,” and the moment light
appeared, what happened? All the hidden actualities became phenomena,
they became visual actualities and all looked round like this and
said, “Good God, phenomena!” They were all phenomenologists in
those days. Can you believe that, phenomenologists? And they all
started screaming. The name of one of them was Sören Kierkegaarde
and he started screaming, “Subjectivity is truth.” And the
darkness said, “Wait a bit, wait a bit, wait till the
eighteen-forties before you say that otherwise you won’t get the
proper hearing, calm down,” so he calmed down. But the strain of
calming down killed him at an early age too.

Now
nothing comes out of a bucket that we don’t put into it in the
first place. Nothing has come out of that Infinite Darkness except
that which is in that Infinite Darkness and we are still in the
infinite darkness, but the Infinite Darkness has played a trick on
us, deliberately, for a very definite reason. And that reason is,
that prior to this trick, the Infinite Darkness was an infinite,
omniscient, omnipotent, self-internalised Being, knowing itself
absolutely and enjoying itself absolutely and it was enjoying itself
so much that it said, “I wish there were some more creatures to
enjoy this joy.” Now how could it make creatures to enjoy the joy
without pluralizing? It could not. It had to say, “Either I have to
remain on my own or I must go down to the ground and die, and then I
will bring forth fruit, lots of me.” So He voted, not like the
Knesset, who say funny things like, “We have, after long debate
with our three party system, and have come to the decision that we
should not make decisions about whether to give land back of the
Arabs or not.” Leave it in suspense. God did not do that, He said,
“I’ll risk it.” It is dangerous because He has got nothing to
make this plurality of except himself. It is not dangerous to Him,
you understand. He is O.K. It is dangerous to the bits that He makes
because He can only make these bits out of Him. These bits, each one
called a monad, a one off, the Lord of its own being, that is the
‘ad’ root, Adonai
echad, he is the lord of himself, each one of
those, and it is God that has pluralized Himself and made lots and
lots and lots of gods. But it is very risky, because when you make
gods out of God, each little god is like God, in every respect except
one. That is, it is not in the dark, it is in the light, and in the
process of precipitation, it has become separated off from the
others.

It
looks around and it sees phenomena, from its own centre, and it says
from its own centre, “Those beings are moving about like monads,
like I do. I wonder if they are gods or not? Then it finds some of
them are very sleepy and they make a very good diet, the sleepy ones,
because, one of these gods, by gobbling up other gods that are a bit
dopey, can appropriate their energies to himself. All right, it is
quite ethical. It is only God eating God, can’ t be a law against
that, can there? So those who are a bit more awake than the others,
start eating the dopey ones and defining them as food. Food actually
means force, power, divided off from the Infinite for assimilation by
a finite.

Track
7

Now
in the process of this encapsulation, that makes
out of Infinity the monad, we have a process which occurs and it
looks like that. In the centre is the original precipitate, the true
essential monad, the one of each. We could repeat this diagram an
infinite number of times and
that would constitute a diagram of the universe of monads and each
one of us is one of those. The innermost part there is essential
Will. The essential will of the being is the innermost part but that
innermost has exactly the same capacities that the Infinite God has,
the only difference is that now, he is now in appearance and the
Invisible God is not in appearance. This one is phenomenal, it has
shone, it has shown itself, it has come out from the Infinite
darkness into self-presentation in the process of segregation and
time. And then, as it is in the presence of an infinity of other
monadic beings of the same order, we could start to drawing others. I
won’t bother changing colour and it is surrounded by those and at
this point here, the periphery there is an external stimulus, so we
have an immediate opposition, a centre of volitional initiative, that
is our very essence our very real beingness. Now because we intend to
spread out, because we were infinite were we not, in the dark, so we
have a deep ambition to get back to our infinity, so we tend to
spread out, but so do all the others. And the result is there is a
collision at a certain distance which we call the periphery of being.
I did that brown to symbolise the Earth Body. Between your centre of
initiative and your Earth Body perimeter, there, I hadn’t got any
blue so I did it in green, but I know you will for give me, because
green is about the middle colour in the spectrum anyway, there is
your intellectual life. At the centre of your being is your
volitional life, pure volition, no thought, immediate volition. You
do immediately, without thought, something, and the first thing you
do of course, is expand. But you are doing that inside an infinite
field of other monadic expanders and all your energies going out,
crash against the energies of other beings and it is this crashing on
your periphery of other energies, that you call your skin surface.
Your skin surface is only that distance from your initiating centre
which has been imposed on you by other centres pushing out. So we
have no limiting factors upon us other than the willed intention to
limit us of other beings, which is fair play, considering our
intention with them.

Now
if we now say that the centre of initiative, by definition, is a
primordial point because of the tail of the sperm, the drive, the
wiggler, we have to say the centre of that being, in our analogy, is
the male part of the being. It is the part that first formed, that is
eidetic, that is the idea, and it is the part that first initiates.
What it first initiates is form, idea. So the will’s first sphere
around it is the sphere of ideation, a sphere of thought. And it
pushes that thought out, as far as it can, and it collides with
another being. And then in the collision, it spins. Did you see that
a lovely microphotograph recently, of an ovum attacked by a very
large number of sperms and as they drive at it the ovum began to
spin, just like a Catherine Wheel. That is very good. Now, what was
the purpose of the spin? From the mechanistic point of view the
inequality of the spermal stimuli on it cause it to rotate because
they were unequal attacks. From the metaphysical point of view, the
spinning created a greater difficulty for the sperm to get in, so
that only a very persistent, a very dedicated sperm would get into
that ovum.

Track
8

There
is your skin surface, and your physicality as
such, the peripheral line, the brown one, the green one here
represents your ideational structure and the red one in the middle is
your volitional essential self. Your essential self ideates, by act
of will it creates ideas. This is very important from a therapeutic
point of view, because supposing somebody comes and hits you with a
hammer and you get a local bruise. That is a destructive violent
activity from outside your syst`em. That is O.K., because the moment
you get hit a message comes from the initiative centre inside, “Just
sort that lot out will you please and restore health.” The curative
intention in any situation comes from inside the being, the
destructive activities that come from external stimuli can only
attack your body but they cannot, actually make your centre ill. That
is very important therapeutically. The centre of a being cannot be
made ill by an external attack. It does not matter what it is. If you
put a man underneath a steamroller and flatten him, unless he himself
says, “Oh diddums, poor me,” he will start repairing. He has the
power to do so. He may have a reason for not doing so in case anybody
asks him to do it again to prove that he did it the first time. That
is one of the faults of living in the Twentieth Century, they always
want you to do it again.

Now
let’s think about this. If we call this the masculine, initiative,
ideational being then the external being must be called feminine. It
must be that which has been taken out from the centre of being. And
in the middle here, we have an area, a mid-zone through which
messages of initiative come from the centre to the periphery and from
which, from the periphery to the centre pass the external stimuli.
So, the mid-zone must be hermaphroditic. It must be able to take a
message from outside from the physical body, from the feminine side
and pass it through the mid-zone of ideational into the volitional.
So in that mid-zone here we have around there ideation conditioned by
substantial experience which we feel and emote about, but inside this
ring we have ideation precipitated by volitional intention. Look how
complicated that is. We have drawn three simple circles and already
it is very complex. The middle one is initiative precipitating its
next circle, ideation, pushing that as far as it can until it meets
opposition, physical body. Your physical body, your ideational body,
volitional body. In Indian philosophy your volitional body is called
the causal body and the ideational body is the subtle body and your
physical body is the gross body. But however we name it, in whatever
system, we are up against a trinity.

Let
us keep that diagram in mind and think very carefully about it. We
are all demoted, sent down from a primordial state of incandescence,
preceded by an invisible, unknown, absolutely unimpeded, Infinite
Self-will, which cannot be defeated because there is only itself.
Whatever it wills comes to be because it wills it. There is no
opposition unless it wills an opposition for itself. And the first
thing it wills for itself is an idea. and the idea is called The
Logos in the fourth gospel. It is called, by good intelligent mystics
like Jacob Böhme, the anti-stroke to God the Father, because the
volition itself is immediate. So that, whatever it brings to be by an
immediate act of volition, will immediately vanish unless it
immediately posits it again. So whatever it would do, as soon as
created, would cease to be and would have to be reposited again. In
Qabalah that is called the reign of the Edomite Kings. They make
universes and they vanish. “I’m sure I made a universe a moment
ago. Where has it gone? Never mind, make another.” And then one
brilliant specimen leapt in and said, “I have got the secret! Make
a form, make ideas, make ideation, make an eidetic structure. Will it
and set up a mechanism to keep it going so that it is
self-perpetuating.” And, that world is the world of Plato’s
ideas, a world in which forms are willed to be self-perpetuating so
that you don’t actually need to keep repositing them by special
attention. It is like learning to drive the car. At first you have to
pay attention, which foot to put on which pedal and this is the
steering wheel and so on, and you condition your physical body to
behave in a routine manner so that you can gradually learn to sit
back and enjoy the scenery while you are going down the motorway at
120 and the speed limit is 70 with your eye on the mirrors for the
cops.

Track
9

Now
we can only do all these marvellous things because we have liberated
ourselves by making mechanisms. We can’t liberate ourselves without
mechanism. We can’t come up out of the mines and out of the sewers
unless we mechanise them and computerise them. The whole advance of
Cainish science is simply to release us for further creative
activities.

Now,
we are hermaphrodites, whether we like it or not, it is only a slight
stress accent, a matter of a little bit of testosterone, a little bit
of this or that hormone and you can develop a lovely bust if you
wanted one, or, you could get rid of it, by a simple change of
chemistry. Why so, because chemistry is precipitated volition? Every
chemical is a will to formulate in a certain way and that is why
drugs can work. That is why drugs can hallucinate you because they
are actually, mysterious powers. We are all hermaphrodites but we are
generally not aware of that.

Now
what is the Divine Hermaphrodite? The Divine Hermaphrodite is the one
that de-vines it, D.V. That is to say, he is aware, reflectively,
that he has as much woman in his manhood as he has manhood in his
womanhood. If he is aware of this and can actually control these dual
functions in himself, then he is a Divine Hermaphrodite and he is
like God. The whole object of evolution, funnily enough is to be just
like God. That is not greedy, that is common sense. If God
precipitates a world to pluralize gods, to make gods able to play
with gods, then it is the duty of every reflexive being, to become as
godlike as possible. But to become godlike, is to rediscover one’s
fundamental, pre-polar being as will. Pure will which wills to
section itself as male- female, positive-neg, giver -receiver. It
wills this because it is the only way that it can make itself
conscious of what it actually is. Without setting up a resistance you
cannot test your own strength, your own intelligence.

When
you get hold of yourself, one hand by another and press against
yourself you feel more like you, don’t you? Do a simple exercise,
just press against the side of your head and press back with your
head against your hand and don’t you become aware that you have got
neck muscles? Have you become aware that you have got neck muscles?
If you have not you are being lazy. Were you aware that you had neck
muscles before you did that or had they lapsed? They had lapsed. You
have all kinds of things hidden in your underwear and elsewhere. You
have got deltoids you see, and funny things, biceps and triceps, the
latissimus dorsi and so on, marvellous mechanisms inside you never
think about them. Do you ever think what a rotten thing it is to
create a marvellous mechanism and then forget you have got it, like
having a super car which you have worked all your life to afford to
buy and you get it and you are so proud of it you put it in the
garage, you are frightened of using it in case some idiot parks his
car and scratches it so you don’t use it. You just think about it.

And
then the garage burns down.

And
the garage burns down, right? That would be a message from above if
it did that.

Here
we are, whether we like it or not, we are hermaphrodites. We become
Divine Hermaphrodites only in one way by self-conscious reflexive
awareness of the polarity of our own being, and in so doing, we have
to make a decision. We cannot do it without making a decision. I mean
we all agree that we are protoplasm. Do you agree that you have got
as much girl in you as you have got boy? Do you like it?

No.

You
don’t? Well you had better learn to like it. Because otherwise…

I’m
doing my best.

You’re
doing your best

Now
the only reason a man does not like being a girl is because he is not
yet a man. There is no other reason., do you know that? A terrible
thought, that. Most men are only half way out of the pond, and the
pond is woman. When you ponder on a thing you are being a woman. When
you deliberately analyse it logically, then you are being a man, and
if you take the conclusions of your logic to their conclusion you
must affirm that the Alpha, the beginning and the Omega, the end are
equally valid, because they are the same. There is no Omega, a final
conclusion of evolution without an Alpha, a beginning, a Spirit that
had this hidden in it and then precipitated it. If you once accept
the conclusion, then all the men who are worried about the relative
size of their genital organs, or whether they will function or not,
if they stop worrying and say, “I am a man-woman, a woman-man and I
will assert this to be a logical fact, and having asserted it I will
say there is no difference whatever in ultimate value between being a
little boy and a little girl.” Now can we affirm that absolutely?
If so, we are Divine Hermaphrodites already. All we need is a bit of
practice to prove it.

Track
10

Now
the enemy is inertia. What is inertia? It is the previously
established way in which a being has been working, nothing else.
There is no mysterious power in the universe, called inertia, that
comes and gets hold of you. There is only the way you have used
yourself to date. That is all the inertia there is. So, to overthrow
inertia, what do you have to do? Re-conceive yourself, give birth to
yourself in a new idea, a new substance, a new feeling sensation, a
new initiative. But, the old inertia says, “Oh, I’ve left it a
bit late, why bother, better to die quietly and then, next time
round,” because you see, the soul knows that it is immortal so it
does not care if it does die when it has made a mess of something or
when it has lost face. It will die and say, “Well, next time, I
will do better.” And this is coddology because the same thing will
happen again, because every time you do something, you have added a
unit of inertia into your being. So, if you actually said, “I have
made a mess of my life, I might as well die, I will fade away,
everybody will be sorry and then the next time I meet them, they will
treat me better.” That would be a first step journey of thousand
miles, begins with first step, to a new inertia, the inertia of
saying, every time you get born, “I think I will leave it until I
have grown up and then I will go negative and die, and then I will
try again.” You actually establish a cycle of failure with
self-imagery as the determinant.

Now
think what that means. The centre of our being is pure volition. Pure
volition is initiative. It can do anything whatever. It has no
inertia. It can do
anything whatever, and if it thinks about it, it is not being purely
initiative. What it can do is posit a thing to remind itself that it
is really initiative. The thing that it posits to remind itself that
is really initiative is the Logos. Logos, remember Logos, Lamda
λ Gamma γ, Lamda
is that light, that incandescence, that intelligence, your eidetic
structure; Gamma is
your physical body. When you look at the Logos word, tell yourself,
“This Logos says my intelligence, my Lamda,
my eidetic structure which I willed is the very, very coherence
principle of the mineral matter of my body, which is Gamma.”
There is no Gamma
structure other than Lambda
insight and that insight is willed.

What happens
then?

We take our
volition, pure volition and we will with it reflexively saying,
“Whatever happens to me, I willed to put myself in that situation.

Now what
happens?

While
I was away I had to attend an exorcism of evil spirits and the woman
who was possessed by the evil spirits, having had explained to her
that there weren’t any evil spirits other than life-force
frustrated, and having had it demonstrated to her that there weren’t
because the evil spirits that were frightening her went away when she
looked at them and would not come back, she then accused the
gentleman who had been exorcising the evil spirits, of making her
believe in evil spirits when they don’t exist and she told him off.
And he said to me, “This is terrible. She is accusing me of
misleading her. She is very, very annoyed with me.” And I said,
“No, she isn’t annoyed with you at all. You must tell her that
she is not annoyed with you. She is annoyed with herself for trusting
you.” Now that is a key thought. Nobody is ever really annoyed with
somebody else. They are annoyed with themselves for trusting the
other person and they can’t bear the feeling of annoyance inside
themselves, because they know it is true, so what do they do? That
psychological trick, they project the annoyance outwards onto the
nearest unfortunate target and say, “I am annoyed with you!” why?
“Because I can’t bear being annoyed with me. I am a nice fellow,
how can I be annoyed with me? I am intelligent, I have got
initiative, I have got ideas, I have got sensitive feelings, and I
have got real substantiality, so there can’t be anything wrong with
me so there must be something wrong somewhere so it must be with
you.” And that is called projection.

Track
11

Now
it is a very good thing, projection, because it allows you, like
every bad thing, it has got a good thing in it; it allows you to see
outside yourself, in somebody else, objectified, that which you dare
not look at inside yourself, because, inside yourself, from your red
centre, from your pure volition, you know perfectly well that your
intention originally was nothing but the highest. You never had any
intention of doing anything but good did you to everything? You are
going to make an orderly universe. You won’t notice you will be
modest about it, you won’t tell everybody you are the boss, you
will just do good everywhere. Your intention is pure and perfect. How
then, can you be at fault? Answer, you can’t. It can only be that a
wicked stimulus from outside has come in and invaded you and
distorted your original plan. Sounds OK, except that the stimulus
that came in, came from another being with the same good intention.
And that is where you have to compromise with other people, because
if you don’t, you will continuously project your own error of
leaning on somebody on the outside instead of leaning on your own
volitional centre. When you realise that you are, like Trevor who
has reformed, in the last few minutes, and has decided that women are
every bit as good as men, haven’t you? He is being modest now and
does not want to shout “Yes,” he is just quietly inside admitting
it and saying it is a bit rough. It is like being a doctor and
spending God knows how many years at a university studying things
that are quite out of date from a thirty-year old textbook. You don’t
want to admit it do you Trevor? His eyebrows wiggled and he pursed
his lips or his lips pursed and his eyebrows wiggled.

Trevor:
Incorrect analysis.

Pardon.

Incorrect
analysis

E.H.:
Yes, on my part?

Yes.

Would
you like to explain it to me?

Yes.
I’m always prepared to have that presented to me.

Yes.

I’m
always fascinated to feel the truth.

E.H.
You can feel the truth. Well if you can feel the truth why was my
analysis incorrect?

To
be honest…. Funny thing that…. The simultaneity of Absolute
serial…

Had
it not got to be acceptable to you

Yes.

But
hadn’t it got to be acceptable to you in the level at which you
conceptualise yourself?

It’s
in limbo.

You
have gone back into the primordial darkness now, haven’t you!

How
did I do that?

You
won’t…

I
can say what you all like, and I can say what you like.

But
I am trying to twist you into? Well do you know that there is no
education of beings with their bottoms in the pond except by
trickery? Do you know that? No education whatever of beings with
bottoms in ponds except by trickery because they are frightened of
their bottoms drying up if you bring them into the air, so you have
to pull their legs a bit to get them out. And that is why Jesus
always spoke parables to people and then a double parable to the
disciples. He said to the disciples, “To those who are without I
speak only in parables but to you it is given to understand the
Kingdom of Heaven.” That is so they could nod their heads, and
before they knew what was happening they were teachers, weren’t
they?

Comment:
Should have had their bloody heads chopped
off!

Just
having their heads chopped off:

Right,
can we try again Trevor? Have you now passed into the state where you
can see and you are not going to be pushed into it by me doing tricks
are you?

No
I won’t

No.
Can you?

If
I admit to the proposition

Yes

And
define what you say is necessary to thinking, then I have got to
believe in itI am not
willing to do that.

Ah
…

I
am not willing to do that

You’re
not willing to do it

Except
for inertia.

Except
for inertia,

Yes.
Which is a world which has caused me to have made the statement I
have, about the thing which I have to do before I die , then I can
walk forward and see an improvement.

E.H.:
Within your then limitations? That is several seconds ago isn’t it.
You must feel that now, within your present newly enlightened
condition are you prepared to confess that women are just as valuable
in the ultimate scheme of things as men?

Yes.
And you really feel that is true don’t you.

Yes.

And,
when you look backward at your earlier condition when you did not
want to believe that, at that time was it because you did not believe
that or because you did not want to believe it?

It
was too painful.

Too
painful. You did want to believe it, but you actually knew it was
true even then didn’t you? But it was too painful to accept.

Track
12

Now
this is the whole thing about getting out of the pond. Remember that
we have been demoted from a condition of invisible volition, through
visible ideational structures called minds and from there to solar
plexus self-wills and then to planetary physical bodies, you’ve
come down, and we have to climb back again in our awareness
internally. So we must reverse the order of descent, mustn’t we?
The meaning of the physical incarnation of God in Christ, is simply
that every intelligence, to complete its own education, must come
down, must be demoted and must initially agree with the demotion in
the dark, before the incandescence of the universe, we are all actual
monads there, we are all eternal spirits, fire spirits, seraphs, with
God, hidden. And if we did not agree with Him sending us down we
could, because we are of identical substance with God, refuse to go.
So that we are down here means that we have acquiesced in the
demotion, in the going down.

T:
To what extent, I mean I can’t feel into … there is any sense
in that except for one aspect of it, the logic of the darkness.

E.H:
The logic of the darkness? But you can feel that can’t you?

Yes,
of necessity it must be, because in it’s darkness the Sentience
must have been there. Of its darkness, light became.

Right,
yes, and you originate in that darkness, don’t you, yes, and the
darkness is not made of parts is it?

Yes.

It
is a continuum. And therefore, the particular, which has come to be
you, in that state of primordial darkness, must be acquiescing in the
descent into matter, because, it is not other than the continuum. The
continuum can’t send itself down against its own will, but only
with its own will.

That
would be impossible without the stimulus.

Yes.
That is the meaning of the Christian statement salvation is
impossible without crucifixion, death, burial and resurrection. They
are symbolic ways of expressing that psychological, spiritual truth.
The Infinite Power, utterly and absolutely, infinitely
self-determinant, cannot pluralise itself, cannot make beings to play
with, without cutting itself actually, into bits, that is by act.
But that does not affect its being a continuum, because an action is
only a modality of the continuum. So, the original decision that you
made then, in the dark, when you got in the light and were caught by
phenomena and came down, progressively into the human body on earth,
that original decision you deliberately forgot. Because if you did
not forget it you would not be able to concentrate fully on the
examination of the trials and tribulations of your life in the
physical body, could you? So, mythologically you are said to drink
the waters of Lethe, of forgetfulness before you incarnate again.

You
are an eternal spirit incarnate in a visible body. You can be kicked
and hacked and pinched by the people round about you can’t you?

Yes.

And,
the Lower self does not like that fact, but it is your higher self
that said you cannot complete your education unless you actually do
go down and experience being kicked, being beaten, being thrashed,
being crowned with thorns, and so on, you cannot be complete. You
must know all things, must you not, ultimately, to be yourself?
Otherwise, there is going to be a deficiency in you somewhere isn’t
there?

Yes.

And
you are going to say, “Oh there is something I don’t know about
which that fellow knows about, so I must know about it.” But the
only way we can know all things is by suffering all things. There is
no other way. That says so logically. Now the next thing is, we have
said it in the realm of logic, can we say it in the realm of the
will? We have gone from the physical factor of being pinched and
kicked, to the idea of being pinched and kicked and now, how about
the will to be kicked and pinched?

That
is all right.

Is
it?

Yes.

There
is a lady sitting next to you give her one of your fingers and tell
her to give it a good bite. Give it a good bite! What is the matter
with her? Bite to hurt. Does it taste horrible?

Just
beginning to feel it then.

Yes,
but what is the difference…. …..

I
affirm

What
is the difference to you handing your finger to her to bite and her,
suddenly, without your permission, biting your finger?

Prior
assent.

Prior
assent, nothing else. But what happens to the quality of the
sensation of if you got prior assent?

It’s
a lot easier to bear.

It’s
a lot easier to bear. Now isn’t that the whole key to life? Instead
of waiting for them to kick you, say, “Anybody feel like kicking
anybody today? Here I am.” The whole quality changes doesn’t it?

It
does.

It
does.

Thatis not kiddology.

No
that is not kiddology, that is real, sound psychology isn’t it.
Real, empirical psychology. But the moment you change your will and
seize the initiative in that anticipatory act of self-sacrifice, you
have totally immobilised the opposition. Now isn’t that nice, isn’t
it simple?

Yes.

Track
13

Yes,
it’s very, very simple, isn’t it complicated and the complicated
simple?

Yes
isn’t it simple?

Yes
but it’s very, very complicated sitting here and well may this be
being decided within the ultimate.

No
it might not. The question is whether, if they agree with it
logically. ..Do you agree with it logically as a proposition?

Some
say heh, heh, and some say no, no, no. If you see the logic of it
then your in that middle zone there, the intellective zone , to make
it absolutely dynamic and super-powerful to collect what is called by
the mystics, ‘Dragon Power’ you convert it to volition. You say I
am actually willing to endure all things, so that like St Paul, “I
don’t boast, not that kind of fellow, and if I did boast, I’d
have more to boast about than you’ve got.”

G:
The difference between putting a finger in a person’s mouth and
asking a person to get hold of a person’s nutcrackers and asking
them to squash your balls.

Not
really. Have you tried both? No there isn’t really because as a
matter of fact, if you actually offer those delectable morsels to her
do you know that she has a deep biological respect for them, and she
will say, “Oh don’t be silly.

I’m
not talking about her, I’m talking about some other fellah.

Oh,
a fellow! Why are you getting yourself mixed up with fellows
suddenly? Fellows won’t jump on them either, no, not if you’ve
got that much nerve and say, “Well we only jump on them to terrify
you, but the blighter’s stolen a march on us.” Do you believe it?

No.

Alright,
I’ll ask doctor Wadsworth. You lie down there Gerhardt and ask him
if he has got the thing going.

Yes,
but he has …. This is a different situation. If you have got
somebody raving mad at you and threatening to squash your bloody
balls.

But
how do they get raging mad at you other than you being stupidly
cocky?

I
don’t know, people get bashed up, crowds come out from football
matches that their team has lost and they just set on anybody without
any provocation.

Yes,
but haven’t they gone there in order to be justified in setting up
anybody without provocation?

I’m
talking about the bloke on the receiving end.

Ah,
but they went there for the same reason

No,
I’m talking about the passer by…

What’s
he doing passing by a football ground any way? Very intelligent
people see if there is a football match on, they don’t go that way
in their cars, do they?

It
would be a joke if they are getting some.

I’m
suggesting, I’m put it to you Gerhardt, that you, yourself, that
you yourself would not put yourself in the kind of position where
that would be likely to happen.

I
would be bloody terrified.

You
are not truly scientific! To be scientific you must be totally
disinterested and entirely objective and a sharp observer, with one
eye co incident governance, and measure it. And if you did that you
would lots of volunteers, wouldn’t you?

They
would squash your balls wouldn’t they?

Yes
look if you did it correctly with a scientific thing you could make a
hundred thousand quid in the Daily Mirror immediately.

Who
would it profit?

You’d
manage without them.

See
this basic nervousness in men because they are putting the accent in
the wrong place

You
see the particular commodities that Gerhardt is talking about are
extrusions of will

(Laughing)
That’s a lovely though that is.

They
are just wills dangling about, waiting to be noticed. Did it ever
occur to you why a man has those things which are supposed to be
essential for existence dangling where , in a natural situation, they
could be seen and admired?

They
can be tested.

Tested,
yes. Look at the etymology of that when you get home.

It’s
all a question of daring to walk out isn’t it and show what you
have got and see what happens.

Track
14

The
whole thing in the Universe is this, that the Absolute, Intelligent
Power, if it had not created a plurality of beings, of which we are
some, would be languishing on its own, just looking at its own
darkness to itself. Now that wasn’t good enough because when God
said, “Let there be light,” He said, “And it was good.” He
thought that light was good. He made it and he said it was good. That
is a good definition. “Anything I make is good.”

When
He has posited that Universe and pluralized in that way, what is His
next thing to do with the phenomenal world, with the world of
appeariential beings? The next thing is to do push them through every
conceivable evolutionary possibility, of formal demonstration, of
conflict, of everything else, until you have totally exhausted the
possibilities of phenomenal existence. Try all things, hold fast the
good is the operative thought.

Now,
if you can actually affirm that as a jolly good idea, and I put it to
you , it is quite easy too imagine, which would you rather be,
wrapped in infinite darkness in perfect self-possession of no thing
but infinite darkness, knowing yourself to be omnipotent, omniscient,
in the dark, and no Universe, would you rather stay in that condition
or would you like to phenomenalise yourself, pluralise yourself,
temporalise your eternity, materialise your spirit and see what else
you can do apart from languishing in the dark? Which do you do? You
have come into the phenomenal world. At some point, you made a
decision to do so otherwise you wouldn’t be here. Now are you
regretting your decision?

Would
that be an asset.?

It
would appear so but if you examine yourself you will reverse that
decision. You say, “I forgot that I sent myself down.”

But
you have to be convinced of that. You can’t even make the next step
until you are convinced of that.

Who
is going to convince you?

You
have to be convinced internally, don’t you?

Internally in the will, in the will. So it is entirely a
matter of will whether you will or not convince yourself and it is a
matter of will.

T:
Why not of feeling as well?

E.H:
Well a feeling is an assessment, isn’t it, yes? How do you assess,
how do you asses whether you have willed or not?

By
feeling that you have done so.

By
feeling that you have done so

It
becomes a fact because it’s working energy that manifests in
results

In
results. That is the outer circle, the external result, and in
between there is an ideational process governing the structure of the
manifestation.

Well,
where does consciousness come in?

Consciousness,
remember the word con-sci-ous-ness means you have analysed the
content. Before con-sci-ous-ness there is Absolute Sentience, not yet
cut up, not yet analysed. The SCI in con-sci-ous-ness
means snip, snip, snip, cut into bits, like scissors. Before you cut
it into bits, which is an intellectual act, not a substantial act, an
intellectual act, before you make that act you are not con-scious,
you are absolutely sentient. You are a pre-pluralised being essence
but you are not conscious.

Now
this consciousness has never been defined because …… so it will
necessarily be an eternal noumenon, therefore is of the essence of
will?

O.K.,
that is fine. It’s a nice analysis.

So
then, if there is sentience prior to consciousness as you have
defined, where is the condition of the analysis of tonight?

Which
one?

Of
the idea of the darkness as allied to minerality ?

Well
it is quite simple really. Our sensation of light is produced by
evolving a pair of optics.

You
talk about the light of consciousness.

Yes
but the light of consciousness, is it not true that a congenitally
blind person does n’t have a sensation of light in the mind, so he
does not talk about the light of consciousness, because that is a
metaphor. He might talk about the sound of consciousness if he is not
deaf, or the taste of it or the smell of it, yes? Because when you
are talking about consciousness you are talking about the content.
But there is not any content other than that which is willed. You
will yourself your own content, yes? So the little circle in the
middle, the red one, wills that green one, which is the ideational
structure and then it wills to operate the ideational one in the
material world as an ex-press-ion, a pressing out. But it is all a
product of the will, and the will is the male and the external is the
female and between the two is the hermaphroditic process where you
admit that you have got an idea and you admit that you have got a
feeling of being. Your feeling of beingness is female, your idea is
masculine. You admit that you can initiate changes. That is
masculine. You admit that you suffer the action of changes of other
beings. That is feminine. And those four processes go on inside
everyone but they don’t become conscious until you appoint for them
a word to separate them from another content. So it is through the
word that you make your analysis. Hence Logos, ratio, word and logic,
the process of clarification of mental contents, through the word.

Track
15

The
only enemy is inertia. There is no inertia other than previously
established patterns of will.

So
what does it mean to us? We have to go back onto the centre of will.
Now the tendency in the mind is to look for external stimuli for
anything you do. That is only a product of a few millions of years of
inertia. Once the penny drops, once you comprehend that really it is
volition that has put us where we are. That volition has to be
rediscovered. You go inside yourself. You go through your receptive
feeling passivity to the external stimulus, your feminine nature and
your dive inside yourself to your will.

And
at that point a very peculiar thing occurs. It inverts the symbology.
You have now become very feminine because if you define the feminine,
you define the feminine as non-rational, don’t you?

Yes,
that’s the pattern.

Yes,
but that initiative is the same thing as non-rational isn’t it? So
that the very thing that we started by saying, masculine initiative
is feminine will isn’t it? We have turned the thing upside down.
Can you see that it is justified? It is a fact that a masculine
dominated society, technology, know-how, mathematics, geometry,
logic, ideas, have stated and been stated to be to be masculine in
origin and feeling and poetry and music and things, have been said to
be feminine, but, if we examine them we find that they are all
hermaphroditic. You can’t have a Mozart without feeling and you
can’t have a Mozart symphony without good notation. The masculine
and the feminine are actually, inextricably, not two at all. It is
only a stress accent of verbal usage in the social structure, and by
social I am not meaning merely on earth, but in the social structure
of the Macrocosmos, that this apportioning of initiative and ideation
to the male and feeling and substantiality to the female has been
brought into effect. Only by that polarisation can we get the
necessary tensions to make ourselves aware of our own being. And once
we have begun to understand that, we begin to be very, very pleased
at the opposition we get because all oppositions are there willed by
that dark Absolute and agreed with by us as individual monads at our
top level, our Hexonic level we agree with it. We cannot complete our
evolution, we cannot attain out true selfhood, our real utter
determination of the soul, freely, without this opposition.

And
therefore, we have to say we have willed, like the dark willed the
light, we have willed to impose upon ourselves, every conceivable
kind of opposition that we experience and encounter. When we accept
the theory of that, the theory is on that middle circle, then we have
only one thing to do, make it volitional. Instead of merely nodding
the head at the idea, will it. Instead of running away from
opposition, seek it. As soon as the word gets around that you are
looking for opposition, they won’t give it to you. They only give
it to you if you don’t want it. If they think that you can
assimilate it and deal with it, they won’t give it to you because
it is feeding you, it is making you more powerful than they are and
that they will not voluntarily do until they get to a very, very high
level, where they do not care two hoots about power of any kind,
because they have got it.

Now,
how do you all feel there if you accept the first proposition? Have
you got physical bodies please? Have you got ideational behaviour or
do you think? Have you got ideas of any kind whatever, and have you
got will? Right, now tell me which is prior, your physical body, your
ideas or your will?

Will.

The
will. Now if you remember that, is it not your duty to yourself,
every moment, to go back on your centre and say, “I am willing this
situation? I refuse to act mechanically to an external stimulus. I
will my behaviour as from now and I will not to project on another
person the responsibility for that willing.” Can you do it, can you
feel it, O.K isn’t it? Is there anything left in the whole universe
worth learning?

No?
It is very the ground of all ethical systems, so let us go back to it
and try, say, within the next half hour, just try to get hold and tri
means three-fold, get hold of your body, get hold of your idea, feel
it and then will it. Whatever you are doing say, “I am willing to
say this,” not, “I am being trapped into saying it,” but, “I
am willing to say it.” When you are drinking your coffee, will it,
don’t do it mechanically. If you bite a bun, will the bite, don’t
do it mechanically.

If
everything you do is done in that way it is a perfect act, it can’t
be otherwise, and when you do such an act reflexively, you are, at
that very moment, a Divine Hermaphrodite, and, if the next moment you
forget it, you are not a Divine Hermaphrodite, so that you have to
continually re-posit yourself in that process.

THE DIVINE
HERMAPHRODITE

Part
Two

The
second of two talks given by Eugene Halliday at Parklands. Ishval
Audio 55

Track
1

We were
talking about the hermaphroditic nature of the human being. We were
pointing out that every man has passed, in the uterus through a phase
of being female. And of course, he is glad to leave that behind.
But, whenever we leave something behind to go towards something in
front we tend to forget what we have left behind. And therefore, the
man, going forward towards rationality and initiative, actually,
historically, tended to forget that he had any feeling, any genuine
compassion for the universe such as he observed manifest in his wife
before they were married, and in this forward movement, in forgetting
his other half, his physicality and his feeling, he actually reduced
himself from the level of the whole being he hoped to become, to the
level of half a being.

Now
I want to talk particularly about this to the men because the men are
more guilty in this respect than the women. The women have not really
tried to go forwards at all, so we can’t blame them if they don’t
get there. Lao Tse says, “He who does not declare his aim cannot be
said to fail.”

The
reason for this process, if you remember, do you remember the diagram
we did of the flat sea and the sloping sea floor, and the fact that
in the shallow water the cells got more sunlight and became more
vigorous, self-impulsive and eventually grew tails and became the
spermoid in type whereas the eggs that were in the depths of the sea,
deprived of any sunlight, remained relatively passive and did not
grow any tails. The ones who grew tails began to rush about doing
what they called empirical research. At least, that is what they call
it now. It is the same thing. It means prodding everything you meet
that looks at all, weaker than you. In the process, sexual
relationships arose, because the ones with the driving power of the
tails, attacked the ones without the tail and in this attack, they
proved their superiority, their superiority in attack. They did not
prove their superiority in defence but they did in attack.

Now
this is tremendously important for human relationships and
specifically, in relationships between men and women, opposite poles,
because progressively and particularly in an accelerated manner over
the last two thousand years since Christianity burst on the world,
the woman has been overthrown. There is a statement attributed to
Christ, “I am come to destroy the works of woman.” We will see,
shortly, what that meant. When we remember that at one time we lived
in caves, in those days, to run, for safety, into the cave, was the
most important thing for survival. So imagine a situation in which
human society is dwelling in caves, and where going out into the open
sunlight could be very dangerous. All kinds of large predators
existed which endangered the life of man and to run into the cave and
roll a stone over the front of the cave was terribly important. But,
the cave was associated, protopathically, remember protopathically
means ‘without sharp intellectual discrimination,’ all similar
things are put together. So, a cave and the womb, the vagina and so
on, were put together because they were vaguely similar. So to fly
back to Mummy when you have hurt yourself, to fly into the cave to
escape a tiger became equivalent. To go to Mummy for safety, to go to
earth, to hide in the dark, dank cave away from the predators that
prowl about in the sunlight was the mode of life in those days.

Track
2

Then
there came another concept. And it arose through men, having to go
out in the sunlight to hunt and to make sure they were not killed by
predators, the men, who naturally, sexually, disliked each other,
banded together. We know that they disliked each other by looking at
the behaviour of stags or bull seals. There is no friendliness
amongst males where the opposite sex is concerned. The whole of the
animal world shows that fact. So that, when men got together, they
got together against their biological nature. And that is
tremendously important. We can equate biological nature with the
female and the force that transcends biological nature with the male.

Now,
imagine, when the men went out in the broad sunlight, they went out
in bands so that whatever predator of whatever size they met, they
could club together. Remember that is the origin of gentlemen’s
clubs, they can club together any creature that singly they could not
club. You will then understand the ethics of gentlemen’s clubs, and
also what to expect if you meet a gentleman. If you enter into
conflict with him in daily life or in business, you will be up
against not the individual but what today, is called The Old Boy
Network. That is to say, a group of other men like him, genital men,
if you use your dictionary, gentlemen and genital man means the same,
they will club together to maintain their individual freedom. Now
this is a dialectical thing. In order to survive individually, the
men realised that they had to deny their separate individuality and
make themselves into a commune. And t he ground of this commune was
logic, a thought that says certain things follow from certain deeds,
and if you can accept that this will be invariable and a single man,
fighting a large animal alone will probably lose, but a thousand men,
fighting the same animal will probably win. Now that is logic. The
men had to accept this logic because they couldn’t survive in the
fight against the predators in the daylight without accepting it. So,
that the male came to rely on logic, on analysis of the form of the
situation, and then having made the analysis, to accept that they had
made the analysis and, through trial and error, to find that the
analytical method gave success, and therefore, to like logic, in the
end, to love logic and make logic their God. That logic is the same
logic referred to in the fourth Gospel as the Logos.

Now
in the process, instead of flying into the cave for security, the men
in the situation of danger, formed squares. They put themselves back
to back to face the predators or the rival attackers of other tribes.
You there see the whole principle of the difference between man and
woman. In the cave-dwelling matriarchal periods, safety meant, run
back to the cave. Run back to Mummy because she was in charge of the
cave and have your wounds or whatever, assuaged in that cave, and
that is why the pursuit of sexual intercourse by depressed men is
still the method of attaining self-respect again. Every time a man
feels defeated in life, in daily life, business life or any other
kind of life, when he feels defeated, the defeat causes him to
regress back to the early cave-dwelling period so that he tends to
run towards the cave, and as there are not many of them around these
days, he runs to the next equivalent, and that is the protopathically
associated form, the woman, to try to get back into the original
cave, the womb, if possible. When surrounded by the bulk of your
mother it does not matter who kicks her to pieces as long as the
kicks don’t penetrate to you in the womb. That is the best place to
be. And this has left a very deep psychological tendency in the male,
when lowered in resistance or survival capacity by events of any
kind, to want to go towards a woman. And all the other men who have
not been disturbed think it is a very bad sign when a man runs home
to his mother or wife for solace.

But,
in the process of extricating themselves from the cave, the men had
to formulate a new religion. Remember, religion means, ‘binding
back to a principle.’ The original principle behind all principles
is Sentient Power. It is power, because you can’t explain cause
except in terms of power, of force applied. And it is also sentience
because it is only through sentience, through feeling, that we know
anything whatever. So we have this unbreakable, dual polarity,
Sentience and Power, together. They cannot be separated, you cannot
be sentient other than a manifestation of power and you cannot be
powerful in all departments unless you have sentience, awareness of
the situation in which you wish to be powerful. So, Sentience and
Power go together, S and P, the first two letters of the word Spirit,
Sentience and Power, S.P.

Track
3

Now
the Infinite Sentient Power is the Absolute source of all phenomena
that we know about. You use A.S.P. for Absolute Sentient Power.
Reduce it to a word if you like and say the Asp, think of the one
that bit Cleopatra, it is the same one, it is a primordial energy,
functioning long before formal restraint in a manner called bliss,
the Nirvana of the Hindus, the Heaven of the Christians and Muslims
and so on. Bliss, and bliss means uninterrupted, unimpeded motion of
Sentient Power. Sentient Power moves towards self-projected goals and
Sentient Power, if not impeded from them thoroughly enjoys itself and
like God says, whatever it does, “Behold it is good.” It is only
good because it has posited it and attained it. It would not be a
good at all unless it first posited it and then attained what it has
posited.

Now
when the men found that they could actually survive in groups, they
said, “Let us change the religion. The religion before men attained
this group activity in the open air was called the religion of the
Magna Mater, the great Mother, the Maha Ma, a supreme female figure,
dwelling in the cave, to whom everybody went for security and advice.
But when the men realised that they could actually survive in the
open air, and, by fighting back to back could defeat anything, then
they said we will now have a new God. So, instead of the dark, earth
goddess as supreme object of worship, they said now we will worship
the supreme god of the daylight sky. The name of that god was Zeus.
That Greek Zeus and the Jaos of the Hindus, means ‘Glistening
Ether.’

When,
on a bright sunny day, you look up and there are no clouds, what you
see is a glistening, and imagine that glistening extended to Infinity
and that is the god, Zeus, the glistening ether. But, that same light
is actually the very source, by a progressive series of
condensations, of the life on earth. There is no matter that is not
degenerated spirit. There is no spirit that is not light: there is no
matter that is not dark.

The
earth, as a compacted mass of energy, millions and millions of years
ago was not so compacted. It was expanded, it was a gas and it was
vibrating and it was luminous. It was a gas in a state of
incandescence. It was the god Zeus. Now the men, when they worshipped
this god of light, also worshipped the god of consciousness, the god
of perception, the god of wide-open eyes. Those of you who have seen
Indian Drama, who have watched the Hindus playing their dramas of
gods and demons, they will notice a very peculiar thing about them
you don’t find much in Western theatre and that is the tendency to
display their eyeballs. What they are saying is, this means light,
this means I am conscious, this means I know, and some of the
fiercest demons have the biggest eyeballs, and they keep their
eyelids up, they must know.”

Now
Schopenhauer once said that the greatest value of a human being is to
attain individuality, free individual consciousness. But,
unfortunately, this same individuated consciousness is the biggest
crime there is. That was a dialectical statement. The greatest
supreme good of human kind is to become a free conscious, wide-eyed,
open individual and in that very moment it commits the greatest
crime. Against what? Against human solidarity as a community, with
rules. Now there has been a pact, an unconscious pact originally, but
progressively refined by philosophy to become a conscious fact, the
social contract. Whether they did it on paper first is irrelevant the
fact is men came to realise that in the commune they could solve a
problem that they could not solve individually. And yet,
mysteriously, in the moment of getting together to solve it, they
destroyed the only thing that they had that was worth having. The
only thing that humanity has that is worth having is spontaneity, is
life, immediate response to a situation without calculation. But, if
you respond immediately to a situation, can you have a society? And,
a lot of thinkers have said, “No, you cannot have a society,
because, if everybody is free and spontaneous, they are also
unpredictable.” But a society is based on a routine process. To run
a society, to keep the sewers under the road instead of over them,
you must have a procedure and you must maintain that procedure, and
you must get up in a morning at a certain time and go to a certain
place and think certain thoughts and perform certain actions. And if
you do that then you are a socialised human being, but, in the
process you have lost the reason for doing it, because the real
reason for getting together was to make life better, to make life
freer, to make life more intelligent.

But
what we actually find, in the history of social groupings, is that
societies have been rules by oligarchs, that is, by a handful of men
who somehow have become corrupted. Power corrupts. They have become
corrupted so that instead of remembering the ultimate goal, namely
freedom, perfect, intelligent co-operation inter-function, they have
said, “All these beings who are subject to our educational
commands, can be used as if they were oxen.” Now that is a very
important idea. The oligarchs have said all these beings, who are
potentially human, can be kept at a sub-human level with the
appropriate methods of indoctrination, and then we can be free, we
can be human, but only at the expense of most human beings being
analysed, reduced to the level of an intensive farm with locked up
chickens and locked up pigs and cattle.

Track
4

You
know, from the last war, what it was fought about, that this is true.
Nazi Germany wished to eliminate anyone with any individuality. The
most individual people in Germany at the time were Jews, therefore,
they had to go, and at the same time, to reduce everybody except the
top oligarchs, to the level of oxen who will not argue, who will
accept, absolutely, the commands, the dictates of the Führer. Now
that historic, repeated tendency in the name of solidarity of effort,
necessary for success proved in the ancient world, by the overcoming
of big predators and very weighty animals like the mammoth and the
bison and, in the name of that success, to say, “We know how to
plan better than most people and therefore we will plan.” But then
they fell into planning for their own advantage and not for the
advantage of the whole community. Animal Farm was written specially
to show you exactly the process, and the man who wrote it was very
depressed at his own experiences in the police force and in politics
and in journalism, because he saw it was actually happening.

Now
it is a male thing that brought life out of the cave and by
combining, logically, to become more efficient, to set up a system of
social government called Principle, and this principle was logic. And
this principle was put up in the place of immediate, spontaneous
movement because you can’t have a man who has promised, if you meet
a big predator, to stay with you and strike with you, if, when he
sees the sabre-toothed tiger coming, he changes his mind and deserts
the pack, so there have to be rules. And then some people, actually
think clearer than others and because of that, those people who do
not think so clearly said to the clearer thinkers, “Tell us what to
do.” And some of the clearer thinkers did and some of them did not,
and those that were very near to them soon learned to kill off the
very clear thinkers and to take over the authority that they had,
rather like you saw in Iran where a religious organisation displaced
the authority of power and yet immediately starts doing similar
things to the kind of things it was supposed to be condemning. Now
this happens in every country of the world wherever men are thinking,
logically, on insufficient data. That is tremendously important.

Now
when the males took themselves out of the cave, they didn’t want to
have anything whatever to do with female dominance. So, they decided
to make for themselves special organisations. Survivors of such
organisations today are bodies like the Freemasons, in which ladies
are not members but men are, and they go through mysterious rites and
principles and they commit to memory procedures of social
relationships and they are supposed to be oath-bound to obey the
principles that they have given lip-service to. When they dissociated
themselves from the female on the outside, from the dominion of the
grandmother figure, the Great Ma, when they dissociated from her they
had to dissociate also, from the same inside their own minds. As they
dissociated from the women outside, they said, “If any of the men
suspect us of having feminine characteristics, they won’t trust us.
So we will have to eliminate the feminine characteristics in
ourselves.” And basically those characteristics are two. First, a
pre-occupation with immediate emotional response, because you know,
at least, those of you who are married know perfectly well, that
immediate emotional response, is a property of woman, but immediate
emotional response might mean that instead of going to fight the
tiger you go and have a drink by the stream instead, because the
immediate emotional response, corresponding with Kierkegaard’s
first aesthetic phase, is exactly the same in the woman and in the
baby. The baby wants what it wants when it wants it and so does the
female side of the human being. Now, when the men realised that if
they were detected to have any feminine component inside them at all,
their fellow men would not trust them, they began to conceal their
feminine characteristics from their companions. Then the oligarchs
devised exercises which survived in military square- bashing today,
exercises to kill any tendency to feel, any tendency to be immediate,
any tendency to break out of the logical necessity of the situation.

If
you go in the army, you go under oath don’t you? And you abandon
your right to be a free-thinking individual. You go under orders, and
that is very masculine. If you examine the history of Persian
Mithraism, you will find that the whole history of military technique
requires that the male warrior shall not feel. It is very difficult
if you get a baby on the end of your bayonet to keep it on the end of
the bayonet and not drop it through sensitivity unless you train
yourself hard. But when you are doing bayonet practice, what do you
do? You are taught to pull horrible faces, to make horrible noises
and to attack. You practise on a stuffed dummy but you are practising
to stick it in a real person. You cannot do this if you have got any
sensitivity., and you cannot even put your foot on a fly without
cringing, if you have got any sensitivity. So the great militarists
of the ancient world, set up a lot of rules whereby the male should
divorce himself absolutely for the two feminine characteristics; one,
spontaneous feeling, immediate emotive response, and, two, wanting to
preserve the physical body. You see, you can’t be a good soldier if
you protect your body in a battle, can you? You know how to play
chess, ‘toujours l’attack.’ If you play a defensive game you
can’t win. You must go out to the enemy and you must kill the enemy
before he kills you. You mustn’t sit there smoking your cigarette
substitute cheroots in the trenches, wondering whether that fellow
was coming over in the middle of the night. You must go out and find
him. You must kill him by that most marvellous of all inventions of
the militarists, initiative.

Track
5

Now
this totally divorced the male from sensitivity of feeling and
compassion so that it was absolutely disgusting if you had any
feeling for anybody. You can’t go and kill a pregnant woman with
sensitivity. It’s not possible to do it. I know a woman who was
beaten when she was pregnant, in Germany, with a rubber truncheon, on
the stomach, just to show that she was an inferior being, by a man
trained and conditioned to do so. Now we know that in Germany today
there are not any men who would confess a tendency to do that but we
also know that human protoplasm records all experiences in itself and
whatever we have had ancestors performing in the past is recorded in
us today and could occur again. And, all this dissociation from
trying to preserve your physical body and having compassion was a
necessity of a militarist society that was destined to conquer the
world.

So
there we see a man, throwing out of himself the feminine components
of his own being rather than admit to fellow men, that he might
become emotional in the middle of a battle. You don’t want men
breaking down emotionally and screaming hysterically and rushing away
if you are under attack, and any of you who have been in the armed
forces know what happens if you do run in the wrong direction, like
Spike Milligan, with coward’s legs carrying him away, although he
himself was very brave. You can be shot by one of your own officers
for doing that, and that is a very good ancient, Mithraic, military
principle.

Now
when the man who had decided he was going to eliminate the feminine
component from his being, succeeded in doing so, his success was only
this, that he hid it from his conscious mind but he had not actually,
thrown out of his protoplasm his own feminine component because that
is impossible. He could still feel it. We know this because on the
battlefield, if you shoot a man he shouts, “Mother.” You know the
one word ‘Mother,’
first word of the infant, last word of the brave, you know that one,
don’t you? lovely song, “Prize her while she is living, No truer
friend than Mother from the cradle to the grave.” And that
actually happens, in war, that men scream for their Mummies! When
they get blown to bits, all the bits are shouting, “Mummy, gather
me together, like you did when I was playing and tripped and fell on
my own ball.”

What
are you laughing at? That was singular.

Now
here we see we cannot free from anything that we really are
essentially, substantially, but we can, under pressure from fellow
men, pretend that we have got rid of it, and then what do we become,
we become heroes. We become men, and we become logical machines, we
have no stupid sentimental compassion or such-like things. We are
reliable, we are not like women. We don’t have weaknesses, we don’t
menstruate, we are not unreliable, there is a whole host of horrible
things that we don’t do if we are men. But, when they have thrown
this man out, in their imagination, what happens inside them, they
are deprived of their own sensitivity and their own physicality.

Track
6

It
is rather interesting, that a large number of famous militarists were
also queers. In throwing the woman out of themselves they became
homosexuals. If you have read Lawrence of Arabia’s account of how
that can arise amongst military men together, you will see a very
good description of the process. When men decide they have got no
woman on the inside, they feel cut off from their female components.
They have got no feeling; they have got no compassion. Now there is
the thing in psychology that every one knows about. If you don’t
want to admit that you have got something on the inside you throw it
out and pretend to see it in somebody else on the outside. And
therefore, the males who have admitted this process of
masculinisation, this militarisation, in themselves, these same men,
have, inside themselves, hidden in their unconscious, an ideal
female, very compassionate, very gentle, very considerate and very
physical, very sensuous, because you know, when you develop your
intellect, you destroy your sensuality. But then you miss your
sensuality, because if you have no sensuality, you cannot enjoy the
world, not any of it. Not the smell of a rose or the flight of a
bird, or the movement of a cloud. You cannot enjoy anything if you
are merely an intellectual machine because enjoyment is, essentially,
sensuous.

So,
what do the males do? They throw out their own hidden feminine nature
and they look around for it on the outside. And as soon as they see
any appearance of compassion which feels remotely like the kind of
compassion that they have internally suppressed, then they say, “Ah,
that is it,” and, as soon as they see sensuality outside
themselves, they say, “that also is it.” So, if they see these
combined in one woman, good physique, obviously sensuously rhythmical
and voice compassion, they think that is it. But what they don’t
know is all they have done is project their own hidden femaleness
onto an external being. Now their own hidden femaleness of course,
being their own, is perfect. “How could anything my own not be
perfect. Impossible! Therefore, if I project my hidden femaleness
onto some other creature, that creature has to be perfect! And if she
is not perfect, she is going to be in trouble because I shall have to
make her perfect. I shall have to complain about every imperfection
and by imperfection, I mean everything that does not correspond with
my hidden femaleness.” Now probably, I don’t know whether you
confess it, fellows, but probably, you know that this is true, that
you feel, outside, when you look at a woman, that you measure her for
sensuality and compassion. If she has got beauty as well, physically,
that is sort of, a bonus, because even very horrible women,
physically shaped, I mean, if they have got compassion and
sensuality, they can earn a very, very good living. Whether their
nose is this way or this way it does not really matter very much. But
if it happens that it is correspondent with the Greek ideal as well,
you count that extra.

Track
7

Think
about this very carefully. The men started the rot, the women haven’t
moved. The men have gone wrong, they have divorced themselves from
their own feminine components and then they have projected them onto
any woman who looks remotely like their ideal, and unfortunately,
most of the ideals of men are their mothers. If your mother had big
blue eyes and moments of kindness you go round looking for big eyes
of blue and moments of kindness, and you call it your ideal. Now
unless men are prepared to stop this process of projecting their own
hidden female as an ideal upon their woman partner, you notice I said
men, plural, on their woman partner, because there is only one woman
in the world, really; if they will not stop that projection, they can
never attain happiness with that person. It is utterly impossible, if
you impose an alien ideal on another being, and then require it to
conform to your definition. Socrates knew that, and therefore he knew
that it had nothing to do really, with the woman whether there was a
successful relation or not, it had to do with the clarity of the man
recognising exactly what had happened.

Now
what do we find then? What have the women done when they have
absolutely remained static over millions of years whilst men have
been groping towards something? What were the men looking for? They
were looking for, historically, concerted action to defeat large
animals and predators. They found it. In the process, they had to
eliminate, for the time being, during the hunt, their tendencies not
to wish to be hurt, their tendencies to preserve their physical
bodies against attack and their compassion. Having done so
successfully, what did they historically do with the women? Once they
had come out of the cave and begun to worship the god of daylight,
the women, who were hoping that they would go back in the cave,
occasionally, used to call them, you know, saying, “Oh Ronald, this
is where you used to come you know, when the big teddy bear came. You
always ran in the cave didn’t you?” “Ah,” he said, “I’ve
got lots of pals,” you see. The women made a little mistake because
remember they were not logical. They were spontaneous, feeling beings
and they didn’t work out, step by step, that the men had actually
made a gain by inventing a Masonic Lodge to go to, two or three times
a week. They made the error of trying to advise men to go backwards
to regress into the cave. Instead of saying, “O.K., men, go
forwards, go into the sunlight, kill all the predators, make the
earth fit for us women to walk in safely, and you have our blessing.”
They tried to bait them back into the cave. But, if any one of those
men they’d actually baited to the point when he did not turn up for
an appointment to fight a grizzly bear he was in disrepute and he was
called feminine and he was disallowed in the gang.

The
women made the mistake of trying, by means of advice and suggestion
and if this failed, they began to do what any being does if,
non-rationally, it tries a method that fails, they fell into
tantrums. You know what tantrums are, tantrums are releasing energy
from your central nervous stores in all directions simultaneously in
the body so that every muscle you have got vibrates and contracts and
you jibber and you shake about and you look absolutely horribly
terrifying, because you are using everything you have got. Now how
did that arise logically? Because having failed, calmly, with a
little wheedle, the woman, being non-rational, that is, not committed
to the logical process that the male had adopted for his group
hunting activity, being non-rational, she could not persuade herself
to go serially through all the possible steps so she just released
all the energy into her being and had a tantrum. Now this tantrum
then became a sort of mark, a supreme mark of the female nature,
women have tantrums. It was a technique, and it still survives. It
does not work because it does two opposite things at the same time.
Remember what man has done. He has thrown out of himself, in his
imagination, his feminine components, and those are, physical
sensuality and compassion. Now, when a woman is having tantrums and
throwing the dinner on the new wallpaper and so on, and scowling and
screaming, her sensuous desirability vanishes and manifestly, she is
not in a state of compassion. So, the only two things she has got
have been thrown away. Now unless we become conscious of this fact,
ladies, we cannot win. The only way we can win with men is by
compassion, (I said ‘we’ then didn’t I?) the only way we can
win with men is by compassion and sensuality. Isn’t that nice? That
is the nun and the prostitute.

Track
8

Now
let’s be very, very sure. I want a show of hands. It will be fewer
if I put it in one way round. How many men of you have got the nerve
to tell me honestly, that you really believe that you have got no
feminine components inside you, namely, compassion and delight in
sensuality? Show me your hands. Hannukah, of course, yes, she is
philosophically trained., cos she is using a very special
significance of the word ‘man’ there. She is simply meaning a not
sexual entity at all. She is meaning anything that counts at all. So
we will ignore her. No other man put his hand up, and I know, deep
down inside that you know it is perfectly true. You have a hidden
well of compassion and an even deeper well of sensuality.

Question:
Eugene, I have heard you say compassion is a quality of the male and
very unlikely to be found in the female?

E.H.:
You have also heard me utter that word, most fearsomely listened to
by Ghreta, ‘dialectic.’

Yes
it is.

Now
the word ‘compassion’ actually means, ‘suffering
with ’ doesn’t it? What is meant there
is, when a man has compassion it is because he has become enlightened
and knows, perfectly well, that if he does not suffer consciously
with the opponent he can’t win the game. And his compassion is
rational, it is worked out compassion. “I can’t win with this
screaming, tantrum-filled creature by simply screaming back at her
the logic of the situation. So, what I would do, I would put my arms
around her. That is compassion. I will suffer her tantrum with her. I
might even lie on the floor with her and drum my heels as well. But
compassion there has a very special sense. Male compassion is the
compassion inspired by logic, whereas female compassion is the
compassion of immediate aesthetics, the immediate feeling life
without any rational dictatorship.

Question:
Can they both be said to have the same meaning if you use the same
word?

E.H.:
Yes because there is a thing called contextual criticism about terms
isn’t there? Scholastics of the Middle Ages would have told you
about a universe of reference. When you take a word, that word has to
be in a context and if it is not in a context, it has no meaning
whatever. So we have to put it in one. And, because, particularly
with the human race, we have been polarised by this comic deceit into
apparent males, apparent females, we have two universes of reference
for every term we have got. So if you talk about the high
spiritedness of a woman and the high spiritedness of a man, it does
not feel the same. Say, “He is a very high spirited fellow,” and
what kind of image do you get? And then say, “She is a very high
spirited woman,” and what kind of image do you get? You see, the
context colours the meaning of the term. Never forget your universe
of discourse or your frame of reference or the field in which you are
trying to apply the term you are using. We know it is very difficult
to remember everything all the time. The best way to do it is forget
everything all the time and start afresh now
and re-evaluate every situation now
and then you won’t have a preconception of what it is all about
now, will you?

Let
us do that as a simple exercise, now. Let us say this. Supposing we
will not say what kind of beings we are. Let us throw out the term
human to begin with. We are not human, we are mounds of flesh and
bones and so on, sitting on things, don’t bother to call them
chairs, and there are processes going on inside. Now, I am going to
ask you, is there a unific entity in charge of that mass of chemical
compounds, the flesh body? Have you all got absolute certainty that
resident in that mound of flesh there is an entity, a being
conducting the processes of that mound of flesh? Do you feel that
there is?

I
can feel it?

Who
said that? You said that with your eyes closed, I saw you. Now open
your eyes. Do you feel that there is an entity in charge? And I said
do you feel, not do you rationalise.

Answer:
I feel that there is something holding me together.

E.H.:
Ah! But is it an entity?

By
that do you mean something on its own?

E.H.:
Yes, something entirely self-dependent only?

Answer:
No.

E.H.:No.
You would have been a very bad Buddhist if you had said, “Yes,”
there, wouldn’t you? . What holds the waves together on the ocean?

Answer:
The ocean.

E.H.:
The ocean. It is no good one little wave saying, “I am holding
myself up here.” It is not true. It is not even actually a wave, is
it? It is an intellectual construct of an observer to say it’s a
wave. Merely the water there is a bit higher than it is there . Then
that higher bit is now there instead of there, then there instead of
there and you talk about the movement of the wave. But there is not
one. It is a construct of the intellect of man. Nevertheless, the
whole ocean holds together all these waves. And in the same way the
organisms, the mounds of flesh sitting on the chairs in this room,
are held together by Absolute Sentient Power, and that means a very
interesting, simple thing every one of these organisms is a modality
of that Sentient Power. It is not an entity, it is not a
self-dependent separate being in its own right. It has no rights.

Comment:
A drop of water in the ocean.

E.H.:
It is not even a drop, is it?

Comment:
Well it feels itself to be.

E.H.:
Does it? When did you have your last conversation with the drops of
water? You see you have added a human concept, ‘drop of water. I’ll
ask you this, when there is what you call a drop of water, namely
rain, falling through the air, is it an entity, is it self-dependent,
self-originating? Is it also the same when it was up there a hundred
feet and down here? Or, has it evaporated a bit or gone cold a little
bit, or gained or lost?

Answer:
It is slightly different.

E.H.:
It is slightly different. In some way it must be different. It is the
same as to its absolute substantiality, the power of reality, but it
is absolutely different every moment. This is the meaning of the
statement in all the major religions, “The universe does not exist
except as a concept in the mind of man,” yes? But there is a
process. Heraclitus talked about that, and Hannukah is an expert on
that as well on what it constitutes to be a man. All flows Panta
rheis there is no static entity, there is no
separativity, you can’t even put your foot in the same bath water
twice, can you because, factually, the whole so-called universe, uni-
verse, ‘one turn,’ is a construct of the intellect of man. It is
not anything else.

The
reality is an infinite ocean of Sentient Power and this power has
produced this peculiar polarity that we call male-femaleness by a
very simple device. You remember Hannukah, Parmenides and his
Infinite Sphere, an apparent contradiction. When that Infinity
presses onto a centre, there is not anything there other than the
intent to press, there is no change, no change whatever in that
Infinite Field of Sentient Power but the intention. It hasn’t
changed the essential nature of Sentient Power; it hasn’t changed
the essence of substance. All it has done is intended, like you might
intend to look at your finger like that and take your finger away and
do that. When you do that you are intending and that intention
generates in consciousness, that is in the Sentient Power itself, a
point of reference, and that point of reference is the first male. A
simple point is the first male. But the moment you get such a point
of intention like that, just like your eye has inside it a particular
point on the retina which gives you very, very sharp vision, but is
insensitive to motion, whilst around it is a zone with a sensitivity
to motion but it is not in sharp focus. Can you see the origin of man
and woman there? Sharp focus static, male; yes, non-sharp focus,
dynamic, female, interesting. Its origin is in that power itself. We
are men and women, and some lucky ones, both of them. That is to be
aware that you are actually able to sharply focus something, like I
am looking at the end of David’s nose, now, sharply. When I do that
his toes are relatively out of focus. And if one twitches, my
peripheral awareness will let me know. Like a few moments ago, his
lady wife had a rotating foot like this whilst she was considering
certain propositions. Is that right Claire? We are, actually, doing
two things simultaneously. We are focussing on that which catches our
interest, focus means fo-cus, ‘power-strike,’ and at the same
time we are keeping our infinite peripheral awareness in case an
enemy, or, a loveable friend should appear over the horizon. We have
always got these two things, a peripheral awareness of motion and a
sharp central clear point of focus. Sharp, clear focus is masculine
and an aura around that sharp focus, a sensitivity to motion and
emotion is feminine.

Track
9

Now
unless we gain thorough consciousness of these simultaneously, we
cannot, not ever come to what we are looking for. We are looking for
perfect inter-function. To get perfect inter-function we must see
reality as it is. Man must stop projecting his ideal female nature
onto the woman to whom he relates and he must start examining that
woman to see what she is as opposed to what he would like her to be.
Now we know by the law of Sentient Power that when it moves it always
moves to uniqueness. That is, every person is unique and wills to be
unique like the Absolute, and every person is perfect. But that
person is not a separated, finite, self-dependent entity. It is a
modality of the total cosmic function.

And
when you don’t project your hidden feminine nature outside yourself
onto another woman but you generally observe and start to study that
other being and compare that other being which you think is a woman
with your own hidden femaleness and note the differences and the
similarities, and you have as much care for that external woman as
you didn’t have for your internal woman when you threw her out. Now
then you have the possibility of a real relationship, a relationship
of four beings, a being, male, of initiative and intellection, and
female, feeling, compassion and physicality, sensuality, four
components are there. Most people, in their relations don’t need
four components at all. They deny two of the components in their own
being, and then try to manipulate the external being using only two
components and therefore failing to contact the hidden two components
of the other person. Because inside every woman, as inside a man,
there is the opposite pole, inside every woman there is a hidden man.
That is to say, inside a woman there is a logic that she won’t use
and initiative that she won’t use. Why not?

You
know, in Buddhism there is a theory called the Doctrine of the
Bodhisattva. Now a Bodhisattva is a being who refuses salvation for
himself until everyone else has been saved. Now this also, just like
the origin of male-femaleness in the original Sentient Power, so
there is this Bodhisattva. That is to say, that if there is only
universal power making the universe and there is Infinite Power
beyond the universe, pressing in to the universe to pluralize it,
animate it, dynamise it, make it unique in all its expressions, in
that Bodhisattva we have nothing but the expression of the Absolute
Intent and knowledge that there isn’t anything other than itself.
If anything is going to be saved, it must be that the Infinite saves
itself, because we are only modalities of the Infinite, and if it
does not save us, it hasn’t saved itself because we are modalities.
If that sea doesn’t calm its waves then the sea is not calm, is it?
So, if we are not educated as human beings to become aware of the
realities of ultimate Sentient Power and what it can do, if we are
not educated to become aware of that and to co-operate with it, we
make a mess we make a mess in this very, very cosmos which is
precipitated by that power. So, we make God, which is the short name
of that Sentient Power, we make God unhappy by mucking about and it
is that that required the incarnation into the human being, that
Spirit, that consciousness, that intelligence, must descend and must
educate the human race to stop it mucking about because until it can
behave in that four-fold manner, which is the true reflection of the
Absolute’s four aspects, until it can do that, then universal
unrest is unavoidable. What we call collective, social anxiety is a
minute portion of cosmic anxiety, and what we call cosmic anxiety is
just the biggest sphere of Infinite Anxiety, and that anxiety is
determined to come down in every one of us and educate us whether we
like it or not, because if we are not educated properly in that
cosmic principle, we annoy God.

Now
some people would think that was a heresy. How can we annoy God? The
answer is simple, we can and we do because that same Absolute is all
there is and its essential qualities are sentience and power. That
means to say, wherever it is in every one of its modalities, it is
able to initiate changes, it is able to build; it is able to destroy,
so that we actually have the power to disturb the universe. Not only
do we have the Americans, going and defecating and urinating on the
moon but they will do this throughout infinite space in the future
unless they are properly educated. It won’t be a question of just
be a case of reclaiming Thames sewage water to make it relatively fit
to drink providing you have not drunk decent water in the Lake
District. It means that if you wanted to go for your holiday to one
of the attendant moons of Saturn, when you got there, you would find
somebody had left a blooming potato crisp bag there and spoiled the
scenery. Now until we educate people to take their rubbish away with
them when they have gone on a picnic, the universe is not really fit
to live in, and therefore that Universal Power aims to educate the
human race. And for the human race, at this moment of evolution, it
requires today, that men shall confess that they are as much woman as
they are man and that women, who have always known that they are as
much man as they are woman, should start using their initiative and
their intelligence instead of tantrums.

Track
10

If
we get hold of this clearly, we will find that it is a very, very
simple cosmos we live in. But remember, simple does not mean easy,
because of inertia. What is inertia? It is the amount of energy put
into a behaviour pattern over all the time past. And we have been
millions of years evolving and we have made millions and millions of
ancestral errors, and those errors are all engraved in our protoplasm
as emotive tendencies, fears, hopes, they are all there, and they
make it difficult for us to live the simple life that we could live.
In the simple life, you can actually afford to tell the truth to
anybody. But, could you afford to tell the truth to everybody in
business? Could you afford to tell which group of shares you intended
to buy, to all your pals, without them jumping and buying them a bit
earlier? Don’t you actually find yourself being a little careful
about letting out what you call, useful information?

You
say you tell the truth but not the whole truth.

You
are saying it is the way you have been brought up in a competitive
society; you have been trained to tell lies and to varnish them. We
know that everybody does it. It is some bit of hard logic. Any
capacity that we have got whatever is a derivative of that universal
power, isn’t it? We can’t evolve other than that which the power
allows us to evolve. Only that which it is potentially, can we become
actually. But we are intelligent, are we not? So, it must be,
fundamentally, intelligent, and as we are only modalities, it must
know our purposes and it has the peculiar power, in the Bible it is
called ‘The Curse’, a peculiar power, that when two beings are in
a certain kind of relation it can actually bring them closer together
by simply removing energy from between them and that creates what is
called, a ‘line of least resistance,’ and they then move together
and believe that they are following their own inclination, but they
have actually been manipulated by the Field for their education. How
do you like that? Interesting.

Now
the male mind….

It
must be the Field that is doing it

The
Field has the whip hand, absolutely. If anybody has any other purpose
than the Field has, the Field, being eternal and infinite, can afford
to let them have it, in both senses of the word. It can let them
fulfil their all their purpose and it can say, “Oh by the way,
logically implied in that was this.” It does not need to beat
anybody up. It does what Jesus says, “It goes in the Way.” And it
goes two miles for one. You want to do something, it will let you and
it will make a slight incline for you to run down so that you do it
rather more thoroughly than you intended, because its sole purpose is
the creation of a dialectical being of two opposites, namely sharp
focus, so-called masculine, intelligence, wide-eyed and alert and
infinite feeling awareness, and both of these, reflexively.
Intellective reflexion and emotional reflexion and these to be so
interwoven that you cannot separate them out.

Track
11

Can
you say something in relation to what you are saying is the essential
commitment is to oneself , that is the dialectic in order to not
have dependency on others…’

Well
I know that sometimes, you know, when you are writing, Bill, and
when you are talking to me, you say I mean big S, not little S, yes,
and when you said “self” then, were you thinking clearly whether
you meant big S or little S.

No,
I wasn’t thinking.

Now
re-formulate your question and tell me which S you are going to use.
Big S is Infinite Sentient Power itself, little S is finite self
identified with a finite ego structure. Not
the little one.

Not
the little one, well in that case you cannot differentiate between
yourself and the other person.

Couldn’t
you ask that question?.

Not
unless you are identified with the ego.

What
you tend to do……
when you are writing and when you are talking to me, you say I mean
Big S not little s. When you said ‘self’ were you thinking
clearly about whether you meant big or little S? Reformulate your
question and decide which S you are going to use. Big S is Infinite
Sentient Power itself; little s is sentience identified with a finite
ego structure. You are not using the little one? Well, in that case,
you cannot differentiate between yourself and the other person.

The
word individuated, the word ‘individual’ means in a state of
dividuation and therefore, necessarily identified with formal
structures. And therefore, if you identify with the egotism, you
cannot be an individual and identify with your individuality to the
exclusion of another individual without being little S,
ego-identified.

So
that is the duping in the marriage commitment.

No
the duping in the marriage commitment is that you had a woman inside
you, suppressed, and you saw somebody walking down the road, and you
thought, “Good God, there she goes!” and instead of saying,
“there I go as I imagine myself.” You see The dupe is that the
Field says, “Here is another bloke that needs educating,” in your
case he is a Roman that wants his empire knocking to pieces, so show
him a Viking, isn’t it? Very clever, and if you identify with
capital S you must know that that Viking and that Roman, are in no
sense different. They are logical pre-suppositions. Builders of
empires, tearers down of empires, they are identical. That is why
Heraclitus is called the ‘Obscure,’ the ‘Scottish Thinker.’

I’m
not clear about what you are saying about not-different.

Well
they are not different, are they not all Sentient Power?

Yes
the statement of difference is the differentiation.

When
you go for a walk and you lift one leg off the floor to stand on the
other one, and then you put that one down and lift the other one up,
is there any difference between standing on one leg and standing on
the other in order to walk?

Yes.

What’s
the difference?

Quite
a different feeling.

Is
it? Do you know why?

Because
your brain is parted down the middle, right? and one hemisphere is
concerned with rationality and self-defence, and the other is the
free, yes? So it is only because you have been conditioned on the
left side to small S that there is a difference. That is an
intellectual difference. It is a fabrication, it is not a real
difference, it is not an essential difference, it is a fabricated
pseudo-difference.

So
that really, in existence, existentially there is no reality of
reality of reality.

Oh
fine, I like that, yes. That is the meaning of there is no God other
than God. You can’t have a God that is other than God, you can’t
have a Sentient Power that is not Sentient Power and that is
absolutely the only real.

What
about the difference between transcendence and reincarnation

We
had this a bit earlier today. When you say ‘reincarnation,’
technically you mean to go again into a fleshly body,

Did
you say incarnation or reincarnation?

Yes
you see, the ‘carn’
means your body of flesh. Just translate that will you? Say your
sentence again and ask what the difference is with being in a fleshly
body and the other.

The
word transcendence means you are not manifested

No,
with transcendence you are not identified with the fleshly body you
are using, but you have one, yes? And the essential off it is this;
the fleshly body is a modality of the Sentient Power which is
transcendent. There is no difference between transcendence and
fleshly body. That is why a good Zen exponent, when he is asked by a
student of fifty years study, he says, “Please tell me what
ultimate reality is?” and he says, “That banana.”

There
is no difference between them?

That
is why Heraclitus said you do and do not put your foot in the same
river, because the differences are intellectual fabrication where the
intellect has abstracted itself from its wholeness in order to do
this clever logical trick of ganging up to defeat the predators. Now
it is essential, when you say ‘self’ that you remind yourself,
which self, at any given second, you are talking about, the finited
identified social ego-structure or the Absolute Infinite Sentient
Power.

Track
12

There
is no difference of race, colour or creed in the Absolute.

We
have to own the past differentiated from the ego self as being a part
of oneself identified with one’s name as a personally individuated
self because we talk about the past withidentification with an
individual name.

Yes
the, you see, identification is the key. You are given a name as a
baby in order to be a convenience to your parents and to society at
large, and the things that they say to you, they say by repeating
that name over and over and over again so a certain group of socially
conditioned ideas become connected with that name, and that’ s your
lowest social ego-structure, but your individuality is bigger than
that. Say in the psychology of Carl Jung, he would say that you
individuality, the psyche, is actually much larger than you ego.

Still
not the big S?

Still
not the big S, no, because there is no individuality as
self-dependent self-originated. Everything is infinite and absolute.

What
is the individuated self?

E.H.:
Do you mean the identified or the individuated self?

The
individuated self

The
individuated self is that closed, relative group of experience
elements recorded in the bio field, the energy of your body, which is
itself, the binding sphere in which your little social ego, centred
on your name, is built. If the baby hadn’t got an individuality in
the first place, it would not respond when you called it a name.

So
it is a mediator between the Supreme Self and the ego?

E.H.:
That is very good Chinese philosophy. In China you have three
fundamental elements, Heaven, Earth and Man and Man is the mediator
between Heaven and Earth. Heaven is Yang, intelligence, light,
purposeful, initiative male. Yin is not intelligent, because
intelligent, the telos
means purposefully directed towards a goal which she is not, she is
wide open, so she is not intelligent, and she is dark and she is
mysterious and she is not separated out from the collective
unconscious of the whole universe.

The
same thing as saying only one woman.

E.H.:
The same thing as saying only one woman, but you see this
polarisation occurs by absolute sanction of that Absolute Sentient
Power which is willing the man and the woman, and mysteriously, the
woman is in fact the official figure whereby the man becomes himself
reflexive.

Are
there not weak and strong men?

Are
there not weak and strong men? What do mean do you mean physically?
Yes, I know some women that can beat a man to pieces.

Woman
has the strength whereby when she senses …

Do
you mean strong sensuality? No? Do you know there are some women,
that through social conditioning are more inhibited than others, but
a good fiddler can get the same tune from any old fiddle, even the
cheapest plywood. It is only social imposition that creates these
apparent differences. You will be surprised what luscious
opportunities walk about that men do not know are like that. I knew
one very wise old psychiatrist who said, “I make it a rule, when I
am given a spinster aged seventy not to alert her to the
possibilities because it is a bit late.” Yes, yes, what he meant to
say was, in the day, because he was busy and he had a very
compassionate heart, that man. He once threw a coin to a welfare
worker who was not pretty, in the spirit of Socrates.